Editor’s note: This essay is part of our ongoing Between Us series, examining the factors that contribute to polarization and prevent good governance, good citizenship and good relationships. This piece, from the research manager at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, touches on how we got here.
When our expectations of reality, shaped by the stories we collectively tell ourselves about how the world works, no longer align with our experiences, reality itself can begin to feel like it’s unraveling. I call this fracture between expectation and experience the “authenticity gap.”
Human beings want their explanations of the world to feel real. When the stories we’ve relied on no longer make sense, we go searching for new ones. Yet that desire for authenticity, for something that feels true, can be easily exploited.
These new narratives often begin with a kernel of truth and then spiral into distortion. A legitimate mistrust of institutions can morph into sweeping false narratives. The complexity of modern geopolitics and finance, for example, is far harder to grasp than the seductive simplicity of blaming it all on a shadowy cabal, sometimes personified by figures like Jeffrey Epstein, who become stand-ins for broader, more complicated systems of power. The Food and Drug Administration’s approval of Purdue Pharma opioids, for instance, helped unleash a devastating addiction crisis; genuine anger at regulatory failure can then be repurposed into blanket hostility toward vaccines or experts. Real grievances get redirected toward the weakest targets, while the entrenched interests that benefit from gridlock remain unchallenged.
The hard work before us is to shed outdated assumptions about how the world operates without succumbing to the easy comfort of simple scapegoats. That’s especially difficult in times of crisis, when uncertainty surges such as pandemics, political assassinations, natural disasters and economic collapse, where our impulse to make sense of chaos grows strongest. Doing this work is essential if we’re to build the political imagination, institutions and stories our century demands.
Overlapping crises in the past 20 years have created the impression among many Americans that our institutions are no longer meeting the basic expectation that a government by the people should also be for the people. Americans’ trust in institutions has been in steady decline for years, as Pew Research Center polling consistently shows. They have experienced real frustrations with institutional handling of foreign policy, financial crisis, pandemic response, and natural disasters. Many woke up from the 20th-century American dream, realizing it was no longer true (if ever — particularly for disadvantaged minorities) that if you work hard, you can get ahead and even own a home, while having access to health care that won’t bankrupt you, quality education for your children and equal protection under the law.
Each year, public agencies are asked to do more with less, and exhausted civil servants try to keep systems from collapsing entirely. Sociologist danah boyd has called this “Jenga politics,” a nod to the game in which blocks are pulled from the foundation to make the tower taller, even as it grows more unstable.
As those institutions weaken, the stories that once justified them begin to collapse, too. And when the old stories fail, new storytellers rush in to fill the gap.
In the United States, the expanding authenticity gap has become fertile ground for a new class of public figures — podcasters, pundits and influencers — who position themselves as authentic truth-tellers against a corrupt establishment.
Sometimes these are explicitly political figures. For example, “War Room” podcast host Steve Bannon blends anti-elitism, media spectacle and mythmaking into powerful populist narratives. Some figures are well-known entertainers like comedians Theo Von or Joe Rogan, who cultivate transgressive countercultural lifestyle brands that only sometimes touch on politics. When they do, they make a foray into entertaining tabloid intellectualism that offers “third way” explanations for how the world works when other more staid, rationalist ones don’t hit. Both types of figures affirm the same feeling: Official voices are hiding something and your sense of dissonance between expectation and reality is justified.
Into this breach come loose, improvisational “deep stories,” a term sociologist Arlie Hochschild has used to describe commonsensical stories that capture the emotional fabric of a community. These stories are stitched together from nostalgia, “vibes” and sometimes conspiracy theories, but propelled by grand epic narratives about “taking the country back from the elites.” They offer coherence in a time that feels incoherent.
These voices gain traction not only because they resonate emotionally, but because they’ve mastered the attention-based economy of social media. Platforms that shape our civic discourse reward provocation, entertainment, and the performance of belonging — exactly the dynamics that make these alternative sensemakers feel “authentic” to their audiences. Influencers who speak to niche interests or subcultures can connect more directly with their communities, and that intimacy, amplified through algorithms, helps them punch far above their weight in visibility and influence.
These non-expert sensemakers may not be experts in the subject matter they address, but they are experts in cultivating audiences, trust and attention. In many cases, these influencers have become de facto authorities on everything from health to geopolitics. They fill the vacuum left by institutions that once had the public’s trust. Yet their narratives, especially now that their tellers hold power, can be too tidy to hold solutions to the complexity of the 21st century.
At the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, I lead a research team studying how rumors spread online during moments of uncertainty like elections, pandemics, natural disasters and even assassination attempts. Sharing rumors is a natural human response to a crisis. Scholars call it “collective sensemaking,” the process by which people use limited information like photos, videos, hearsay and articles, to piece together a story that helps them regain a sense of epistemic control.
The public often assumes that the problem of “misinformation” is primarily a problem of bad facts — as if some objective truth could be delivered from on high to solve our collective confusion. But “solving” misinformation isn’t simply about providing facts; it requires delivering stories. Truth is rarely neat or instantaneous. It unfolds slowly, often long after attention has moved on.
In the meantime, our craving for a narrative that feels authentic and makes emotional sense renders us vulnerable to simple, emotionally charged explanations. Political actors, propagandists and opportunists know this well. They exploit the authenticity gap by offering stories that feel true, even when they could be grounded in overly simplistic explanations or outright falsehoods.
The policy consequences stemming from these facile narratives can be disastrous. Overreaction to valid mistrust of “Big Pharma” suddenly results in rolling back otherwise safe vaccines. Upset over suppressed wages or the perception of increased violent crime gets unjustly blamed on undocumented immigrants, resulting in the increased surveillance and militarization of our communities, inculcating a fear of each other and the state. Make no mistake, the pendulum of narrative dissatisfaction can swing in the other direction, causing profound anger and mistrust in the new governing paradigm.
The authenticity gap isn’t a crisis of truth. It’s a crisis of meaning and narrative. Americans are hungry for coherence in an incoherent age, and that hunger makes us susceptible to anyone who can tell a story that feels real.
Closing the gap requires more than fact-checking falsehoods or optimizing social media feeds — though both are critical functions that cannot be disregarded. Closing this gap demands rebuilding the conditions for trust: functional institutions, fresh and accountable leadership and shared stories that resonate with people’s experience rather than contradict it. This isn’t simply a matter of “message testing” but of messaging honestly. Some of this means letting go of old norms and risk mitigation, while looking ahead to rebuild from the debris caused by this administration’s commitment to deconstructing institutions. Looking ahead thus requires a certain degree of psychological resilience that allows us to live in the gray instead of constantly seeking black-and-white truths.
The challenge of our time is to find ways of telling stories about the world that are both authentic and accurate — stories that acknowledge complexity without collapsing into cynicism or simply trying to revert to the past. This requires more than facts. It necessitates imagination — on and offline. Because if we don’t tell those stories ourselves, someone else will. Indeed, they already are.
This project is funded in part by The Poynter Institute as part of its Beat Academy for reaching polarized audiences.
